Move over, Jetsons: Fixed-wing flying car nears production

It looks like a rough sketch from The Jetsons, yes. It costs the kind of money that will reflexively cause some people to toss it in the “billionaires’ toy club” category—and in the short term, that may well be where the product resides.

But no one in the transportation and aviation industry is chuckling any more at the notion of a flying car. In fact, companies are putting powerful resources behind it. And the world is not at all far from being able to ponder the practical applications of what once might’ve seemed a fanciful pursuit.

But for Klein Vision, Pal-V, Alef Aeronautics, Oregon-based Samson Sky and many others, these are still early days, relatively speaking. Should public demand eventually warrant heavy production, prices would likely decrease, and at some point, albeit not soon, the cost to obtain some of these craft could drop into more reachable territory.

“The purpose of the Switchblade is to solve regional travel by allowing people to travel on their schedule to over 10 times as many places as commercial airlines, with less hassle and in less than half the time,” says Samson Sky CEO Sam Bousfield, referring to his company’s three-wheel, street-legal vehicle, an experimental-category aircraft. Samson Sky plans to begin flight testing one of its production models in November; its projected price is in the low $200,000s, depending upon the cost of parts.

Carolyn Barber, Author